TAMPA, Fla. – There are two very good reasons why Kurt Warner doesn’t fear the Steelers; why he doesn’t cower at the thought of a black-and-gold wave of doom closing in on him play after play, down after down; why James Harrison hasn’t invaded his dreams at night, and likely won’t before Sunday.

One of them is easy enough for anyone to root for, because Warner is nothing if not resilient, he is nothing if not a study in old-fashioned persistence and stubborn self-belief and relentless re-invention. He used to stock shelves, remember. He was given up for dead in St. Louis, East Rutherford and even Phoenix, for a time.

It would be one thing, after all, to have risen from obscurity once; he’s done it twice. It would be one thing to have gotten to the Super Bowl with the Rams, who went 45-99 in the nine years before he led them to glory; it is something else to do the same with the Cardinals, who’d essentially gone 0-for-the-nuclear-age before he showed up.

“I think the perception around the league about me was that I couldn’t play anymore,” Warner said yesterday, recalling his long walk through the wilderness following the Rams’ Super Bowl loss to the Patriots seven years ago. “They thought, ‘There’s no more football left in him, and he’s basically just trying to survive.’ ”

He laughed.

“The Cardinals won’t win, and Kurt Warner can’t really play,” he said, “so I guess it was a fine mix.”

So that is a large segment of Warner’s armor, the belief that no matter what

happens from here, no matter how much the Steelers want to hit him and pound him and send him limping off into the night this weekend, he’s already known the hardest of hard times. He’s already seen the abyss. Twice. That strengthens him. And people can root for that.

The other part . . .

Well, that’s the one that makes some people squirm, the part where he lifts up his Bible and gives praise and thanks to his Savior and does it gladly and gleefully. People can tolerate a quarterback praising his offensive line for protection; they are less forgiving to hear that it was Jesus who delivered instead of a left tackle.

He is unabashed about that, about all of it. Yesterday morning, during a 60-minute interview session, he was asked four questions specific to the Steelers. He was asked five questions specific to Jesus Christ. And he was more than willing to give full, thoughtful answers on both subjects.

“You know, when it comes to faith, you believe what you believe,” he said. “I believe in Jesus. It makes all the difference in my life. Everything I do, everywhere I go, I’m trying to live up to or to represent Jesus. Having the faith that I have, believing what I believe, it’s the first and foremost thing in my life.

“I know some people get tired of hearing it, say, ‘How does it relate to football?’ It is who I am, and it will always be who I am, and it’s the most important thing in my life. So more times than not, it’s going to be the first thing I talk about.”

The irony is, in our sporting culture now, someone like Warner puts himself at far greater risk than someone like, say Adam “Pacman” Jones, to pull one skell’s name out of a hat. With Jones, the bar is set low, same as with Warner’s understudy, Matt Leinart – who engaged in some in-character knuckleheadedness yesterday, turning his own movie camera on himself and his interviewers whenever those interviewers wore high heels and a skirt.

But Warner . . . well, there are certain folks who’ve waited for years to see him be exposed as a hypocrite or a heretic, to see him wind up in places and situations that God-fearing husbands and fathers of seven shouldn’t wind up in. They’ve waited for this to all be an act, a front, a fraud. There were an army of cynics watching him during his year in New York, waiting. All of them waiting still.